In the past, portable information equipment such as a mobile PC (Personal Computer), cellular phone, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), and portable game console has progressed in downsizing of various devices to cause significant size reduction of the equipment itself. Contrary to the above, a portable device has progressed in increasingly complex as well as diverse function, bringing about a demand for a display increased in size.
This puts the information equipment in a circumstance that an equipment main body thereof is almost occupied by a display and little space is left for arranging operation button and the like. Therefore, a type of information equipment like this is generally configured to accept an input operation by a user via a touch panel adhered on the display.
Since a display device using a touch panel like this is generally operated by a finger, a touched portion is hidden by the finger to disadvantageously prevent correct selection of a small target object such as a link to a website, for example. Therefore, the display device using the touch panel is required to have a screen in which a pointer is displayed for the user to easily carry out input operation. As a technology for displaying such a pointer, a technology disclosed in Patent Literature 1 is cited, for example. The technology disclosed in Patent Literature 1 detects a contact point by a touch operation to a touch panel provided on a display screen of display means, displays a pointer on a region including the relevant contact point, and detects a position corresponding to a part of the pointer excluding the contact point as a directed position.